ABSTRACT

In the 1980s and the early 1990s, Japanese industries, in particular, those in the manufacturing sector, were regarded as a model system for producing innovations continuously. Numerous studies on “the Japanese model” of innovation (or product development) were published at the time. Most of these works were based on empirical studies on the automobile and/or electronics industries in the 1970s and 1980s, partly because of the remarkable worldwide performance of Japanese industries in such fields at the time and partly because of their unique practices in comparison with those of their Western counterparts. Different writers attempted to characterize the Japanese model of innovation in different ways.